Abstract

Cognitive sciences cannot but profit from a dialogue with evo-devo, as this can provide a sensible understanding of the relationship between genotype and phenotype and conceptual tools like recapitulation, heterochrony, innovation and evolvability. One wonders, however, whether a theory of cultural evolution is possible and whether Dobzhansky's dictum that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, also applies to culture. Besides evolution, we must seriously take the individual's cultural development into account. Finally, if it is true that ontogeny is subject to evolution, it is also true that in the long term even the «rules» of evolution are subject to change.